Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

What is love? My escapades, though few, have been thought-provoking. One day, out of the blue, I received a letter bearing some strange and intriguing stamps. It was from Anna Ulrika Eyde, a girl I had known all through school, but with whom I had lost touch when she moved to England to study engineering. She was currently working on a bridge project on an island in the Indian Ocean and was actually inviting me to come and visit her. And stay at her place.

Anna Ulrika, or Ulla, was what you would call ugly, extraordinarily ugly, in fact. Although I would be more inclined to say: fascinatingly ugly. Her hideousness teetered on the brink of incomparable beauty. To be honest I think I was always a little besotted with her. We had dubbed her the Iron Woman, both because she was so unattractive and because as a little girl, unusually for her sex, she had had a Meccano set from which she created the most intricate — not to mention extremely impressive — constructions out of gleaming, perforated miniature girders. But the woman who came to meet me, years later, at Plaisance airport was surprisingly good-looking. Or, the word came to me right away: ‘striking’ — beautiful as only rather ugly girls can be; the sort who often become famous models. She seemed to have opened up a wing in her person that no one had known was there. She laughed at me; laughed at my evident surprise. The backsweep of her lips, in particular, was hard to ignore; she was so unexpectedly attractive that it made me uncomfortable.

For the first few days I was left to my own devices. Ulla worked for the contractors responsible for the building of a new bridge on the west side of the island. I took a break from diving in the lagoon to visit the island capital, saw the sights, strolled around the central market: you could buy absolutely everything there, from dried squid and herbs for treating asthma or a bad heart to models of pirate ships made out of tortoiseshell and objects for sacrificing to the gods. The most amazing item I came across, however, was a tattered old poster of Sonja Henie in the midst of a soaring split jump against a backdrop of snow-covered Alps. ‘Want to buy?’ the Hindu who owned the stall asked. ‘Very popular. American star. Danced like Shiva on the ice.’ I had to smile at this find. I was struck by the unreality of it, not least because of the cultural and geographical divide: a picture of skates and ice, here, in the middle of the tropics, where books rotted in the heat and humidity and I spent my afternoons lazing on the beach below the bougainvillea-framed bungalow which Ulla had rented close to the beautiful Grand Baie beach.

Then, on the morning of the fourth day, she suddenly showed up in the water, or rather: under the water. Buxom and smiling. She had the day off, she explained as we floated on the surface. Might she be permitted to give me the grand tour?

We drove in her car through a landscape so green that all Norwegian notions of the concept ‘green’ seemed to fall short; the old Peugeot bowled along through Gauguin-hued mountains which took on new and fanciful forms with every turn of the road. Ulla showed me round a recently opened aquarium full of fish which made me think of all the women in brightly coloured saris whom we had passed along the way; knowing that I had just started studying architecture she took me to see some of the island’s bold new, ultra-modern hotels. We climbed the many steps up to a small candy-coloured Tamil temple set high on a ridge overlooking Quatre Bornes, one of the island’s main towns. And at all times: that involuntary sense of attraction, the pull of her lips.

Late in the afternoon, after several stops at places and buildings which struck me as being nothing so much as a series of contrasts, reflections of the country’s numerous ethnic groups and cultures, we came to a lake in the south of the island, Grand Bassin, a mirror-image of the sky amid all the greenery, a sacred lake, site of one of the annual Hindu festivals. Someone was in the process of planting fruit trees. Gradually, possibly due to the look in her eye, her eagerness, it dawned on me that it was not the country, the island, she was showing off to me, but herself. With everything she pointed out to me — boys selling ice cream from big cool boxes on the backs of bicycles, the falling blossom from the flame trees which in many places carpeted the road with red — and all the things she raved about, she was saying: just so, just as diverse, as multi-faceted, am I. And you never knew. She too, Anna Ulrika Eyde, the Iron Woman, was a tropical island in a foreign ocean, one which I had to dive after, discover . In taking me around the island she was also inviting me to uncover the unsuspected mountain formations and impenetrable plantations within her — her temples, her beaches, her reefs.

I stood wreathed in incense fumes, scanning the mirrored surface of the lake while, heedless of my presence, she took out a lipstick and ran it over those enticing lips, laying it on extra thick, as if inspired by the gaudy idols in the little, open-sided temples perched on stilts in the rolling countryside around the lake.

We drove on through fields full of sugar beet. She had suddenly gone quiet. I felt as though we were making our way through something sweet. On our way to something sweet. The green beet plants grew shoulder to shoulder, soon they would be as tall as the drifts at the sides of the roads on the mountain passes in Norway in the winter. But then the countryside opened out and the road wound uphill, into wild country. We pulled in at a lookout point, a lay-by with benches and tables.

From a paper bag she produced small, deep-fried chilli balls and a pineapple which, to my surprise, she proceeded to pare, cleanly and proficiently, slicing away the skin in a neat spiral with a knife that was almost as big as a machete. Before I could take in how she did it the fruit lay before me like a finely carved work of art, fresh and tangy, ready to eat. ‘I learned that from an old man on the beach,’ she informed me solemnly. I liked it: the contrast between the spicy bite of the little meatballs and the luscious fruit. I liked the way she handled that big knife. I liked the pressure she exerted. I liked the jolts of excitement that were running through me.

I admit it: there are few things I know less of than love. Sometimes I think about my sister, who went out with loads of boys. One of them was called Hans Christian. Rakel liked him a lot. But he wasn’t the only boy she fancied. Hans Christian was a truck driver; he had just bought a magnificent new trailer of which he was very proud. One evening he learned that Rakel was at the home of one of her other admirers — she had not yet decided which one to choose. He was so mad that he drove his new sixteen-ton trailer-truck into the garden of his rival and straight through the wall of the extension containing the bedroom. Although it has to be said that he had first checked that Rakel and the others were in the living room, watching TV. The bedroom extension and the double bed were completely wrecked, as was the truck. Rakel was so impressed by such red-hot determination that she married Hans Christian. ‘Believe it or not, but he has eyes as kind as Albert Schweitzer’s,’ she said. To me, however, his conduct in this matter was clear proof of the folly of love. Or its unfathomability.

What is love? Due to an unexpected letter I found myself, as if by magic, among rugged, sculptural mountains on a tropical island with Anna Ulrika Eyde. I savoured the taste of chilli and pineapple, my eyes fixed on her red lips. We were standing by the railing on the edge of a sheer drop into a deep gorge. We were so high up that we could look down on a kestrel swooping over the chasm. To our right a waterfall plunged into a narrow crevasse. ‘There’s nothing lovelier than falling water,’ she said. At the bottom, far below, a river meandered through billowing green jungle, on its way to the ocean. The sky was a clear blue. Again my eyes went to those red lips of hers, the half open blouse, the cleavage between her breasts, every bit as wild and precipitous as the chasm at our feet. Without warning, my body underwent a chemical change; it was as if a powerful pill had suddenly begun to take effect. At that same moment she turned and met my gaze. Her face was unrecognisable, swollen somehow. The next minute we were kissing. I had no chance to register what happened between the look and the kiss, it was explosive. We kissed, almost doing battle with our tongues. It tasted strong and sweet. We kissed as if our lives depended on it, body hard against body. I felt a tremendous pressure in my chest. I could have driven a truck through a wall. She smelled faintly, arousingly, of sweat, tasted of salt water, chilli and pineapple. I do not know how long we stood there kissing. It may have been a good while. I looked up and noticed dark clouds building up, as if the attraction we felt for one another had given echo in the weather. As if a storm had been lying out at sea and we, with our bodies, had drawn it towards land. If, that is, it was not simply a projection of the charged atmosphere between us. The palm leaves scraped against one another in the wind, emitting a hollow, plastic rustle. We had only just emerged from something akin to a maelstrom, gasping for breath, when the first raindrops fell, slowly, far apart: large, glittering, like a crystalline net. For a split-second I had the impression that I could see the whole island, the whole world, including her and me, in every drop.